Since
the night of the full moon, there has been an auditory film rising and falling about
the city’s school—a great evangelical babble, old recordings of a hostile
interrogation, and a murmuring radiation of ink. With no respite, there has
been a serious bombing of normality. Nonetheless, there was no way all the
boxes of special forms and affidavits were simultaneously real and in our imagination.
Or were they? As you well know, sometimes is a time of its own.

So
last night, gazing at the night-sky’s stars flowering in italics, we masked our
eyes with

a
hint of hysteria, half-sleep, after all, being the most delicious criticism of
reason. We muttered to you a faint but extended veneration, heavily quoting the
Opacity Sutra and the Doubled Sutra of the Damaged Interstice:

Is it not the voice

which is sewn

into the soul of the body?

Is not the body

the exchange

of regional gestures,

an instant of respiration

opening intime?

Such are the codes

of the autumn empire,

illegible and distanced

in their approximate location.

Such is the sickness

of anonymous vertigo,

of drinking the emptinessof winter

without words.

Delivered
entirely from practical communication,we
suffered an otherworldly worldliness, a sweeping sorrow of alienations. It was that
discontinuous hour in which the other’s death is necessarily consummated, in which
snow, curiously falling, touches the blotched curl of Yasusada’s smile.

Then
a pain, pure in its origins, welled up around the infantile half-walls of our
vanity. Without explaining, a foreigner in mid-1960s clothing placed strips of
beautiful handwritten stationary and a few lotus leaves about the middle of our
home, a sort of quilt of protection against the original and unknown dampness
that is still acclimating at the heart of the real. A mass of earscopied from French pornographic
drawings populated the sky, receiving but without appropriately trying to grasp
the full-time emphasis of Yasusada’s language. Written over the dawn in immense
particled characters, the message dissolved in miles of undated light. If they
were to be spoken, the names of the departed would be swallowed by some
illegible narrative, mailed but never sent, yearned for but extinguished—like
traces of the closest papercut on
the most western regions of your tongue.

Please
write to me when you can, you, the savored one—or whoever happens to be
speaking from beyond the adolescent ruins of our intelligence—

A NOTE ON THE TEXT: “Disorientations” collages together—and
so “disorients”—two postmodern Orientalist texts: Kent Johnson's Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of
Araki Yasusada, a yellowface simulation of hibakusha literature, and Roland
Barthes's Empire of Signs, a semiotic treatise based on an invented
system Barthes calls “Japan.”